“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.

“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.

All the usual suspects are up in arms. I haven’t bothered to hunt down quotations from the unions that keep schools supplied with janitors, but I’m sure they’re not happy. More than that, though, Newt’s statements have been interpreted to mean that he advocates a return to 19th Century child labor, complete with seven-day work weeks, 12 of which are spent laboring in a coal mine. Take a gander, for example, at this screen shot from YouTube after I searched up “Newt Gingrich poor children”:

This statement isn’t only cruel and, broadly speaking, incorrect, it’s mind-numbingly tone-deaf at a time when poverty is rising in this country. He comes across as a callous Dickensian character in his attitude toward America’s most vulnerable — our poor children. This is the kind of statement that shines light on the soul of a man and shows how dark it is.

Gingrich wants to start with the facts? O.K.

First, as I’ve pointed out before, three out of four poor working-aged adults — ages 18 to 64 — work. Half of them have full-time jobs and a quarter work part time.

Furthermore, according to an analysis of census data by Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociologist at Queens College, most poor children live in a household where at least one parent is employed. And even among children who live in extreme poverty — defined here as a household with income less than 50 percent of the poverty level — a third have at least one working parent. And even among extremely poor children who live in extremely poor areas — those in which 30 percent or more of the population is poor — nearly a third live with at least one working parent.

I’ll accept as true the fact that the poor work, but that’s too facile. We also need to look at their attitude towards work. As Shakespeare would say, there’s the rub. Let me quote from a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, describing the way in which a white liberal tried desperately to explain away the fact that large corporations find it extremely difficult to keep minority employees:

Mr. Bookworm works for a very large corporation. While we were in the car with the kids, the conversation turned to the exquisite sensitivity the corporation has to show when it’s faced with firing a minority employee. The process is arduous, requiring huge HR involvement, dozens of staff interviews and a lengthy paper trail.

The reason for this labor intensive firing is the unfortunate fact that minorities tend to be less satisfactory employees. As Mr. Bookworm was at great pains to point out to the children (and correctly so), this is a group trend and has nothing to do with the merits of any individual minority employee. It’s just that, if you look at a bell curve of minority employees versus a bell curve of white employees, you’ll find more white employees than minority employees in the segment denoting “good worker.” No modern corporation, however, wants a reputation as a “firer of minorities.”

The above are facts. What fascinated me was the different spin Mr. Bookworm and I put on those facts. Mr. Bookworm sent twenty minutes explaining to the children that, to the extent blacks were poorer employees, it was because their culture made them incapable of working. (This was not meant as an insult. He was talking, of course, about the culture of poverty.).

Mr. Bookworm painted a picture of a black child living in a ghetto, with a single mother who gave birth to him when she was 14, with several siblings from different fathers, with a terrible school, surrounded by illiterates, hungry all the time, etc. No wonder, he said, that this child doesn’t bring to a corporation the same work ethic as a middle class white kid.

This creates big problems for corporations. A modern corporation truly wants to hire minorities. Once it’s hired them, though, according to my liberal husband, it ends up with workers who are incapable of functioning in a white collar, corporate environment. The corporation therefore finds itself forced to fire it’s minority hires more frequently than white or Asian employees, with the result that it’s accused of racism. Its response to that accusation is to proceed with excessive caution and extreme due diligence whenever a black employee fails at the job.

My suggestion to the children was that minority employees, aware that it’s almost impossible to fire them, might be disinclined to put out their best efforts on the job. Why should they? Logic and energy conservation both dictate that a smart person should do the bare minimum to get a job done. In this case, for the black employees, the job their doing isn’t what’s in the job description. Instead, their job is simply to keep their job.

Amusingly Newt thinks exactly the same as my liberal husband does. They both blame black culture for poor black employment habits. The difference is that, while Newt thinks it’s a fixable situation, starting with the children and their attitude toward labor, my husband, like Mr. Blowhard, thinks that all one can do is accept that minorities are going to be lousy employees.

America’s black poverty culture (as opposed to the Asian or East Indian) poverty culture is handicapped by a terrible, false syllogism:

Slavery was work

Slavery is evil

All work is evil

Even when they’re getting paid, too many African-Americans seem to feel they’ve sold out — that any work involving the white establishment is tantamount to slavery and that they can participate in this system by participating least. It’s a principled stand, but it’s a principle that’s in thrall to terribly flawed logic and that ensures generational poverty and despair. As far as I’m concerned, Newt gets serious kudos for his willingness to state what is, to the working class, quite obvious: learn how to work well when you’re young, and you’ll be able to support yourself when you’re old.

I also think that Newt is talking about families where they’ve remained in poverty for generations, like what we saw in New Orleans after Katrina. How can a child learn a work ethic when he’s raised by a government subsidized mom and grandmother (and likely no father present). These families are vastly different from families that are poor for a spell but then work their way out of it (such as recent immigrants, or families where the working parent(s) was laid off, etc.).

jj

Growing up on a farm, us childs didn’t know if child labor laws were stupid or not; all we knew about them was that they were irrelevant, or didn’t apply – or something. Dad didn’t know from child labor. He was amusing himself, as I have said – but we planted it, fertilized it, weeded it, harvested it, and then sold it, and he expected attendance and general usefulness from us just as much as he did from the guys he paid.

People put the arm on third-world kids working for a dollar a day or whatever, which is completely understandable. But I always find myself wondering: would they be better off without the daily dollar?

Yes, Newt’s willingness to call bologna baloney is a very good thing.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

The Left can’t be having slaves supporting themselves here, people. That isn’t going to be allowed.

I learned a while back that black men and women who were raised by their birth fathers and mothers made good employees, mostly. Black men and women from single parents were not good employees. Imagine that.

Funny, though. White kids who were raised by their birth parents made better employees than those raised by single parents. I think I’m seeing a trend.

heather

Just tonight at dinner, my nine year old was lamenting that she is too young to get a “real” job that pays money.

http://ymarsakar.wordpress.com Ymarsakar

It’s better for the school to pay them nothing and call it “volunteer” work when they require it for credited graduation, than “pay them” anything. Paying them would be slavery after all. Volunteering them, that’s social justice right there.

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